Mandela

by Anthony Sampson

  In December 1966 a new warder, James Gregory, arrived on the island. He had been brought up as a child among Zulus, and spoke Zulu and Xhosa fluently. He was later to achieve fame through his much-promoted book Goodbye, Bafana, which described conversations with his famous prisoner.74 In fact, Mandela had not known Gregory very well, but, as he put it, “he knew us, because he had been responsible for reviewing our incoming and outgoing mail.”75 In his book Gregory presented himself as a naïve country boy who was surprised to find the prisoners far better educated than himself, and soon recognized Mandela as a real leader, “the perfect gentleman.”76 But the warders who became genuine friends of the prisoners, like Christo Brand, were very suspicious of Gregory; and the prisoners were always aware that Gregory was spying on them, eavesdropping on visitors and intercepting mail, as part of the intelligence system of the Security Branch.77 *

  Mandela kept his cool with the warders. To respond in their own terms, he told others, was to come down to their level. Old colleagues, who had seen his temper in the past, watched with amazement how he could restrain himself in the face of humiliating provocations. Only rarely would he flare up with apparent fury. One day in 1968 prisoners were complaining to Captain Huysamen, one of the most intransigent officers, that warders were sabotaging their studies by withholding materials. Huysamen responded with an insult, and Mandela, who was standing at the back, exploded. Neville Alexander was standing near him; he had only ever seen Mandela in total control, and thought he had gone on a rampage: “It was really amazing and astounding for everybody, because they’d never in public seen him losing his temper.” When Mandela had subsided, Alexander said, “That was rather heavy,” but Mandela replied, “No, no. It was deliberate.” It certainly had its effect: Huysamen went away with his tail between his legs. “When Mandela goes off the deep end or loses his cool he can be quite a formidable person,” Alexander recalled, “but not uncontrollable.”78

  Mandela lost his temper genuinely seven years later, with Lieutenant Prins, the arrogant head of prison in 1975. Prins had refused him a visit from Winnie for the mendacious reason that he did not want to see her. When Mandela argued, Prins retorted that Winnie was only looking for publicity, and added some insults. Mandela was furious, moved toward him and nearly hit him. He restrained himself and instead let loose a stream of abuse, telling Prins he was contemptible, without honor, and strode out of the office fuming. Kathrada, who was watching with Daniels, was astonished to hear Mandela cursing.79 When Mandela rejoined his colleagues in Section B he was still panting: someone whispered he needed tranquilizers.80 Mandela was soon ashamed of having broken his self-control, which he saw as a victory for Prins. He paid a price: the next day he was charged with threatening the head of prison, but he retaliated—with very rational, legal tactics—with a countercharge of misconduct against Prins and his superiors, and eventually the charge was dropped.81

  Only a few foreign visitors ever penetrated into this self-contained world. But soon after the Rivonia prisoners arrived they were visited by an Englishman who they were told was an expert on prisons. They realized it was a special occasion when they were issued with jerseys for sewing, instead of the usual stones to break. As soon as the visitor left, recalled Andrew Mlangeni, “stones and big rocks were brought into the yard on wheelbarrows.”82 The Englishman turned out to be Bernard Newman, a travel writer and lecturer on espionage who was writing a book, South African Journey, and who had made friends with the police, who arranged for him to visit Robben Island. He talked to Mandela in his cell, which he found “light and airy”; but Mandela complained that it was “cold and damp,” that he was allowed only one bath a week and that the food gave him stomach pains. Newman was convinced by the Governor, Colonel Wessels, that the “settling-in troubles” would be rectified. He wrote a report in the London Times and later told journalists that the conditions were better than in many prisons he had visited in Russia and Britain.83

  Six weeks later, on August 31, Mandela had a visit from a reporter supposedly from the London Daily Telegraph, before which he was again put onto sewing garments instead of breaking stones. “On both occasions I condemned conditions in this prison from beginning to end,” he wrote to the commanding officer. “In spite of this fact press reports appeared which indicated that I was being satisfactorily treated.”84 Later, in March 1965, he complained to the Commissioner of Prisons that he had told one of the journalists that Robben Island was being “developed as a model prison,” while in fact the food did not have adequate nutritional value: “My physical condition has considerably deteriorated.” The commanding officer commented: “He is posing as leader of his fellow prisoners and in so doing is also propagating these imaginary grievances.”85

  The next month, in April 1965, the London Sunday Times published a half-page story about “South Africa’s Alcatraz,” with a photograph of the prisoners sitting in a row with their hammers showing—Mandela alongside Billy Nair, Kathrada and Mbeki—together with another picture of Mandela in short trousers, sewing a jersey. Mandela had complained bitterly when his guards were out of earshot, according to the caption, pointing to his crumpled khaki shorts and saying: “All part of the cruel method of destroying our dignity.” Some airmail copies of the newspaper slipped past the censors into South Africa, but they were soon seized by the police, who explained: “The Mandela quote is dynamite and we have blacked it out on all remaining copies.”86

  Another puzzling visitor in 1964 was an American lawyer called Henning, supposedly representing the American Bar Association. The prisoners assembled in the courtyard to meet him, with great expectations; they were shocked to find a rough, tousled figure, rather drunk, who kept spitting. Mandela had been chosen as the spokesman, but when he complained about the prisoners’ conditions and the hard labor, Henning kept interrupting. Finally, Mandela burst out in exasperation: “No, you don’t listen!” Henning eventually explained that many American prisons were much worse, and that they probably deserved the death penalty anyway.87

  Mandela had little reason to be grateful to lawyers’ organizations, but he did know how to use the law. After two years working in the lime quarry he learned that the Transvaal Law Society intended to strike him off its rolls because of his conviction—fourteen years after their earlier attempt following the Defiance Campaign. He demanded the right to defend himself, and to go to Pretoria, with access to law books. After months of correspondence, the prison authorities refused him permission. As Mandela saw it, the government dreaded the publicity he would receive by appearing in court, as it wanted him to be forgotten.88 The Law Society eventually dropped its demand.

  But the government was still harassing Mandela in jail. In July 1966 a sergeant hand-delivered a letter from the Department of Justice telling him that he had been included in a list of members and active supporters of the Communist Party, in terms of the Suppression of Communism Act of 1950. Mandela wrote back: “I emphatically deny that I was a member of the Communist Party of South Africa since 1960 or at any other time,” and then put twelve questions, asking for details of any affidavits that made such allegations, and of any meetings he had supposedly attended. Four months later he was told that his name would not be included on the list.89 *

  But the Justice Department, after a long delay, came back with a different allegation: that Mandela had contravened the Suppression of Communism Act in the Defiance Campaign of 1952. Mandela replied in December 1969 that the campaign “had nothing whatsoever to do with communism,” and that the government were trying to victimize him. He was vindicated in a secret letter sent in July 1970 to the Commissioner of Police by D. P. Wilcocks, the official liquidator of the Communist Party, which was retained in the prison archives:

  I am of the opinion that on the available evidence Mandela cannot be described as an official, office-bearer, member or active supporter [“actiuelle ondersteuner”] of the Communist Party of South Africa. Until such time as any further evidence in this regard comes to light
the matter is regarded as closed.91

  The island was a test case for humanitarian organizations. A year after the Rivonia prisoners arrived their diet suddenly improved, and soon afterward they were visited by the Red Cross. Mandela met the regional representative, Hans Sen, who was an odd choice: a Swiss Catholic who had emigrated to Rhodesia and was now disillusioned with his job. He told his friend the writer Doris Lessing: “Knowing what went on everywhere was enough to make anyone a humanity-hater.”92 Mandela gave Sen a list of the prisoners’ requests—including better food, more visits and letters, long trousers, socks and underwear. When Sen remarked that bread was bad for black people’s teeth, Mandela began to suspect him of racist attitudes. There were some improvements including long trousers; but the diet soon went back to normal, and a later Red Cross report on Robben Island was so favorable that Pretoria publicized it at the UN.93 It took the Swiss some years to realize the hardships and political significance of the prison.

  The most effective visitor was from inside South Africa. Helen Suzman, the only member of the liberal Progressive Party in Parliament, insisted on visiting after hearing stories of wretched conditions. The prisoners welcomed her, and the rare waft of perfume in their cells. They told her that the thirty prisoners were facing over ninety prison charges. She was directed to Mandela’s cell, where he spoke out against the poor food and clothing, the lack of newspapers and books and about one brutal warder (“Suitcase” van Rensburg) with a swastika tattoo, while the prison commander and the Commissioner of Prisons listened. “Mandela ignored their presence completely,” Suzman remembered. “He had a commanding presence over both prisoners and warders, no doubt about it.”94 Mandela was convinced that Suzman was basically on the prisoners’ side. “It was an odd and wonderful sight,” he wrote, “to see this courageous woman peering into our cells and strolling around our courtyard.”95

  Suzman reported back on the inhuman conditions. “Things were bad then in the prison,” she recalls. “They thought conditions had to be as tough as possible, as further punishment. Some of the warders really were Nazis.”96 Soon afterward, van Rensburg was transferred, and conditions began to improve. The prisoners saw Suzman’s visit as a turning point: had she not come, wrote Neville Alexander, “there is no saying what might have happened.”97

  Suzman would visit Mandela seven more times in prison, having lively arguments. They could never agree about violence. On her second visit, in 1969, Mandela maintained that the ANC prisoners should be released, just as the Afrikaner rebel Robey Leibbrandt had finally been set free despite his treachery during the Second World War. Suzman pointed out that Leibbrandt’s rebellion had been defeated, while the ANC’s struggle was continuing, and asked: “Are you prepared to say that you’ll abandon violence?” Mandela could not, so Suzman could not ask for his release.98 But the prisoners would always be grateful to her for her practical help. “I really had no idea,” she wrote to me thirty years later, “what a long-lasting effect this would have on friendship with the chaps I met there.… My jailbird chums remain staunchly loyal, despite my politically incorrect adherence to liberalism.”99

  In September 1970 Mandela was visited by Denis Healey, the combative British Labour politician whom he had met eight years earlier in London. In 1967, as Minister of Defence, Healey had tried to resume selling some arms to South Africa (see this page)—thus showing, he admitted later, “gross insensitivity to the hatred of apartheid both in my party and in the Commonwealth.” Now Harold Wilson’s Labour government had just been defeated, and Healey was opposing Edward Heath’s Conservative administration’s plans to start selling arms—as he explained, “to expiate my own crime.” Healey was struck by Mandela’s transformation since 1962: instead of the dark, bearded man he had met in London, Mandela was “clean-shaven, close-cropped and pale.” But his morale was high, he was surprisingly well informed about the outside world, and “his moral authority, even over his warders, was immense.”100

  After three and a half years conditions began to improve, and from 1967 the treatment of the prisoners was relatively civilized and relaxed.101 They were allowed to wear long trousers and jerseys in winter, and could talk in the quarry and the courtyard. Sometimes they received eggs and fruit. But Mandela saw few of the changes which the Red Cross had promised: the diet was still minimal, there were no newspapers and they were not allowed the recreation to which senior prisoners were entitled. The work was still exhausting, and prisoners were still being assaulted by the warders. In November 1970, after the Red Cross representative Philip Zuger had visited the island, he complained about the “daily rounds of listless and aimless rock and lime-cutting.” He also noted that a prisoner’s lack of outside news “deep freezes him in the state in which he was put away for storage in prison.”102

  Mandela had by now clearly become the spokesman for the political prisoners from all parties. The Commissioner, the elegant General Steyn, had warned him not to speak for the others, who, he said, could complain individually. “And Nelson,” he reminded him, “you are a prisoner!”103 But Mandela refused to accept this prohibition, and in January 1970 he wrote a long letter of complaint to Steyn on behalf of all the prisoners. It reads like an official report from the head of a department. “We have always accepted that firmness and discipline is a necessary instrument for the preservation of law and order in prison,” the letter began. “But it is our firm belief that human beings are more likely to be influenced by exemplary conduct on the part of the officials than by brute force.” Mandela went on to complain about the assaults on prisoners, and the hard labor of his own group:

  For more than five years we have been forced to do heavy and uncreative work which sapped our energy and in some cases even adversely affected our health. Through this period you condemned us to a monotonous routine of either breaking stones, doing pick and shovel work, and denied us all opportunities for any kind of vocational training, or of any work that may encourage and develop a sense of self respect, industry and responsibility in the prisoner, and no efforts are being made to help us to lead respectable and meaningful lives when released.

  He concluded with a serious warning:

  I sense rising tensions and growing impatience with the policy of a department which is clearly incompatible with our welfare, and I urge you to act with speed and to take appropriate measures to relieve the situation before matters go out of control.104

  Pretoria responded by making things worse, appointing at the end of 1970 a new commanding officer: Colonel Piet Badenhorst, who arrived on the island with a reputation for brutality—and with some thuggish new warders. Mandela reckoned Badenhorst was the crudest of all his commanding officers, running Robben Island as if it were under martial law. It seemed part of a deliberate change of policy: Mandela had been told that the treatment of political prisoners was decided jointly by the prison authorities and the security branch, which was becoming more powerful since the formation in 1969 of the enlarged secret service, BOSS.105 “They have launched a sort of reign of terror,” Ahmed Kathrada wrote to his friend Sylvia Neame; “they only know one thing, and that is revenge and punishment.” The guards now picked on any excuse to persecute the prisoners, depriving them of meals and preventing their reading anything—including Shakespeare—which was not relevant to their studies.106 Badenhorst soon stopped them from studying anything, because, he said, they were lazy. Unlike his predecessors, Badenhorst refused even to talk to Mandela, and when he saw him in the quarry he would shout at him in Afrikaans: “Mandela, you must pull your finger out of your arse.”107

  At the end of May 1971 the reign of terror reached a climax which tested all Mandela’s restraint. It was the eve of the tenth anniversary of the Republic (and of the ANC’s last abortive strike), and the warders had spread rumors that some sentences would be reduced as part of the celebrations. But the atmosphere in the isolation block had become tense since the arrival of a group of Namibian prisoners from the South-West African People’s Organization
(SWAPO), led by its founder, Toivo ja Toivo, who had begun a hunger strike which the other prisoners joined. On Friday, May 28, a group of drunken warders burst into the cells, including the notoriously sadistic head warder Carstens, known as the “Devil” (who showed, said Alexander, “the narrow-minded viciousness of a henpecked husband”).108 They told everyone to strip naked, and kept them with their hands up for half an hour in the bitter cold while they searched every cell. Govan Mbeki collapsed and was taken to hospital in Cape Town. Fikile Bam wept with frustration. They could hear the warders beating up prisoners in the adjoining cells, hitting them and twisting their testicles. When Toivo fought back he was beaten to the floor, then forced to clean up his blood-spattered cell.109

  “It was the worst day in my memory,” recalled Kathrada. “It was terrifying, I’ll never forget it.”110 “I felt angry and bitter,” said Sisulu; “it was one of the most horrible invasions of our privacy.”111 The prisoners never learned the reason, but they suspected the warders had been provoked by some bad political news—which always made them (as one prisoner wrote) “as dangerous as cornered scorpions.”112 “Brutality was always linked to some external event,” said Mac Maharaj: “whether guerrillas, rugby or border troubles—anything which threatened the warders’ view of their country.”113